On p systems as a modelling tool for biological systems

  • Authors:

  • Francesco Bernardini;Marian Gheorghe;Natalio Krasnogor;Ravie C. Muniyandi;Mario J. Pérez-Jímenez;Francisco José Romero-Campero

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK;Department of Computer Science, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK;Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning Research Group, School of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK;Department of Computer Science, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK;Research Group on Natural Computing, Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Seville, Sevilla, Spain;Research Group on Natural Computing, Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Seville, Sevilla, Spain

  • Venue:
  • WMC'05 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Membrane Computing
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

We introduce a variant of P systems where rules have associated a real number providing a measure for the “intrinsic reactivity”of the rule and roughly corresponding to the kinetic coefficient which, in bio-chemistry, is usually associated to each molecular reaction. The behaviour of these P systems is then defined according to a strategy which, in each step, randomly selects the next rule to be applied depending upon a certain distribution of probabilities. As an application, we present a P system model of the quorum sensing regulatory networks of the bacterium Vibrio Fischeri. In this respect, a formalisation of the network in terms of P systems is provided and some simulation results concerning the behaviour of a colony of such bacteria are reported. We also briefly describe the implementation techniques adopted by pointing out the generality of our approach which appears to be fairly independent from the particular choice of P system variant and the language used to implement it.